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“Errours Endlesse Traine”: On Turning Points and the Dialectical Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Geoffrey Hartman and
Marshall Brown
Marshall Brown
Affiliation:
University of Colorado, Boulder
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Abstract

As turning points occur, they are always moments of confusion, not moments of clarification. There is no “great temptation” in Eliot's Mill on the Floss, no “balance” in Zola's Une Page d'amour. “Revolution” means aporia, or disoriented turning, and it is intrinsic to Plato's dialectic, as to Kant's and Nietzsche's. Dancing in Renaissance texts such as Davies' Orchestra implies vertigo, not cosmic harmony. Spenser's Mutability Cantos and poems of Keats, Yeats, and Stevens attempt responses to this universal turning; they suggest that we aim not at discovering the truth of outcomes but at comprehending historical processes in movement.

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Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 99 , Issue 1 , January 1984, pp. 9 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1984

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